


Troubled Heart

by yet_intrepid



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Bible, Gen, Religious Content, dunno if the violence counts as graphic but I'm putting up the warning just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:12:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Athelstan struggles with waking nightmares of the violence that happened at the monastery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Troubled Heart

He had not lived through the killing. Not in person. Hadn’t seen the blood or the faces contorted with terror. The screams had been dulled by distance and walls.

He had not been there, yet he had not escaped.

Forever, Athelstan saw the murders in his mind.

Not imagined. That would have implied some level of volition. No, the sights were visited upon him, and he was forced to endure them, over and over, time and again.

He saw Father Cuthbert’s blood leaking out around the edges of a blade and then gushing forth to stain the robes that were always kept in order. Heard last words (prayers, for certain) gasped out, felt the strain of final breaths until his own lungs were contracted.

He heard screams, high-pitched and irrepressible, unrestrained. Screams from voices he knew, had often heard in song, in murmured prayer. Screams that could not be blocked out, that overpowered his own attempts at song and prayer.

Athelstan clasped his arms close around himself, and he felt solidity beneath his robe. Edges, corners. The covers of his Gospel of John.

What, he wondered desperately, did the Gospel of John say? He ought to know, ought to know so many passages from it. He struggled through the screams and the gushing blood and stained blades until he found one phrase, only one:

_Do not let your hearts be troubled._

The words did not rest easy in his mind. Do not let, he thought, do not let. How, oh God, do I have the least fraction of control? My brothers are dead. They are dead. They have been murdered, and I am a _slave._ How is this a question of letting?

He hugged the book more tightly, feeling the corners press into his arms. If he was a slave, under the control of these heathens, suggested something rational and a little hard inside him which he did not recognize, all the more reason to control whatever part of himself he possibly could. And his mind was a place to start.

_Do not let your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me._

Another unrecognized part of himself was asking already, believe what of You? believe why?

But as he began to shudder with unshed tears, he did his best to let go of the questions for now. There would be time enough, certainly, to doubt, and time enough that he would have to live with a troubled heart.

He wept gently and remembered his brothers alive.


End file.
